Cutting Choline with Radical Scissors.

The human gut microbiome is the source of not only microbial diversity, but also of interesting chemical reactions and enzymology. An excellent example of this is CutC, an enzyme that makes trimethylamine (TMA). In this issue of Cell Chemical Biology, Bodea et al. (2016) show how CutC uses a glycyl radical to perform C-N bond cleavage needed for TMA production.